Today we held our company sprint presentation meeting where team leads presented their work during the last sprint. It was very interesting, very productive and very uplifting to see the future of the game presented to us. Here are some of the highlights we can talk about:

World optimization activities include making NPC cities and racial area layouts more practical for players to navigate and more interesting. Monster spawn, NPC, quest, and dungeon redistribution is taking place so that everything is more meaningful, better organized, better associated with the lore and more a part of the bigger picture.

All quests are being rewritten, more dynamic quests are going to be added, faction quests will be more helpful towards newbies and there will be more advanced quests added to the game. The events team is also preparing epic dynamic events and more lore driven events.

The designers have been exploring the addition of aggressive wildlife to the game based on location and time of day, redoing monster families, adding new monster families and more local epic monster encounters (example: the Yeti for the ice continent) and they’re also looking at  mixed monster teams.

There are many player character tweaks, about 200 updated facial variations are more or less complete, new armors planned and refitted to the tweaked player character models. Some issues with this process but they’re being addressed. The motion capture work-flow has been established and we have several tests that were presented to us, and they look great. There are more special effects and animations added to several large monsters, and we saw a demonstration of the new Kraken animations which are complete with new effects and unique attacks for this epic sea monster.

The server control tools and multiple server control project is still underway. Programmers have also been working on some dynamic event related functionalities, and the implementation of some minigame/sandbox/roleplaying features. There are some new functionalities having to do with the chat window, where friend names are clickable and pop up a chat box without having to type a /chat command. There’s also color coding added for clan city visitor names based on their status.

The meditation feature was demonstrated to us today, it’s almost complete and should be added to the game in the next patch or shortly after that. The user interface research is complete and has come up with the framework for the new GUI and tools. These should yield a vastly improved user interface. The next phase for the GUI is the architecture and adapting the current GUI functionality to the new framework.

A new dynamic lighting is now working properly, we were shown a test of this in-game and it was very impressive. We expect this to be added in the next expansion after it is implemented.

We have a sophisticated political map in the works which makes clan associations easy to explore, also it features locations for vendors, banks and other in-game resources. We saw a small demonstration of this in action and it looks really good.

Finally, we were given a demonstration of the new environmental sound system and we got to see the entire functionality of it which has so much more than a demo we had shared with the community a while back. This is a high-end, next gen, real-time surround-sound environmental sound generator which also integrates with the game music system.  Very few other games have something similar to this. During its demonstration we had a very immersive experience and we can’t wait to see this feature in-game.

The sprint meeting just ended and this was me typing up my raw notes from it. We’ll revisit some of the things I barely touch on here and go into more detail. There were also many things in this sprint presentation that I’m not at liberty to discuss yet. However, with every update we are able to reveal more and more. There were also several demonstrations which we’re not showing you here today and the reason is that these demonstrations are meant for developers and for internal use only. Whenever possible we try to make public versions,  so you should be seeing some of what we talked about here today in the near future.

On Monday we have the next Scrum meeting with our plans for the next sprint. Until next Friday, thank you for reading.